The Environmental Protection Agency\u2019s effort to cut emissions from power plants and factories to reduce pollution that blows into neighboring states seems likely to be halted by the Supreme Court, a blow to an ambitious federal initiative that environmentalists have said is necessary to protect people, especially children and the elderly, from lung-damaging smog.<\/p>\n
During oral arguments on Wednesday, the justices appeared divided mostly along ideological lines, with the court\u2019s conservative majority sympathetic to the Republican-governed states and the polluting industries that are challenging the Biden administration\u2019s plans. The three liberal justices expressed deep concerns about the high court\u2019s willingness to take up the matter on an emergency basis before a lower court has reviewed the case.<\/p>\n
Three states \u2014 Ohio, Indiana and West Virginia \u2014 and various industry groups asked the high court to put the EPA plans on hold while they work to defeat the rules in the lower courts. In an unusual move, the justices went a step further than that request, agreeing not only to decide whether to suspend the EPA regulation, but also to consider whether it is reasonable before a lower court has ruled on that question.<\/p>\n
The three liberal justices \u2014 Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson \u2014 repeatedly asked why the court would consider that question while the case is pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.<\/p>\n
Jackson said that the nation\u2019s highest court should not be the \u201cfirst decider\u201d and that she was struggling to understand what emergency required intervention from the Supreme Court at this moment, especially since the EPA requirements wouldn\u2019t fully take effect until mid-2026. She also questioned the assertion from challengers that complying with the federal rule would immediately lead to power and heating shortages.<\/p>\n
Conservatives, including Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, suggested the EPA did not give industries and polluting states an explanation of how the pollution-reduction requirements would work if not all of the covered states had to comply. Although it was intended to cover 23 states, separate legal challenges in lower courts have prevented the rule from fully taking effect. Today, it is in effect in 11 states.<\/p>\n
Roberts noted that the EPA\u2019s rule says there are \u201cmeasurable and meaningful cumulative improvements in ozone levels\u201d in downwind states when emissions reductions are \u201cassessed collectively.\u201d With fewer states covered, Roberts suggested, the agency would not evaluate the efficacy of the program \u201cuntil after the hundreds of millions of dollars of costs are incurred.\u201d<\/p>\n
Deputy solicitor general Malcolm Stewart, who was representing the EPA, said that the agency anticipated the geographic makeup of participants could change and that it would still work with a smaller or larger set of states.<\/p>\n
Supporters of what\u2019s known as the \u201cgood neighbor\u201d rule say there would be real health consequences from even a temporary stay of the EPA regulation, which expands an Obama-era rule that required power plants in Midwestern and Appalachian states to clean up emissions that the nation\u2019s prevailing west-to-east winds carry across state boundaries.<\/p>\n
President Biden\u2019s EPA extended the mandate to cover steel mills, cement factories and other major sources of industrial air pollution. The new limits target nitrogen oxide pollution, a major component of ground-level ozone, or smog, that has been found to worsen asthma, chronic bronchitis and other respiratory illnesses. They are designed to cut emissions of nitrogen dioxide from upwind states by roughly 70,000 tons by the summer of 2026, which EPA officials estimate could prevent as many as 1,300 premature deaths and reduce hospital and emergency room visits.<\/p>\n
In recent years, the Supreme Court\u2019s conservative majority has taken a skeptical view of federal agency power not specifically granted by Congress.<\/p>\n
Two years ago, in a blow to the Biden administration\u2019s plans for combating climate change, a divided court limited the EPA\u2019s ability to reduce carbon emissions from power plants. Now, the court is considering a challenge that could at least temporarily curb the agency\u2019s power to address deadly air pollutants that have long been a source of tension between states dependent on coal-generated electricity and their downwind neighbors.<\/p>\n
Unlike other cases before the court testing the authority of federal agencies to interpret ambiguous federal statutes, the EPA\u2019s power to set air quality rules is clear under the Clean Air Act. Instead, the justices in this case are asking about the reasonableness of the EPA\u2019s technical, scientific and economic judgments \u2014 all of which are well within the agency\u2019s mandate, according to environmental advocates.<\/p>\n
The case \u201crepresents an even further invasion from the Supreme Court into what have traditionally been considered legislative and executive branch policy judgments,\u201d said Sam Sankar, senior vice president for programs at Earthjustice and a former law clerk to the late Justice Sandra Day O\u2019Connor.<\/p>\n
After the plan went into effect last August, a divided panel of the D.C. Circuit denied the upwind states\u2019 request to put the rule on hold while litigation continues. The challengers then asked the Supreme Court to intervene on an emergency basis.<\/p>\n
Legal analysts questioned the court\u2019s decision to schedule argument before a lower court has ruled on the underlying issues in the case and without the usual additional written briefs. According to University of Texas law professor Steve Vladeck, Wednesday\u2019s session at the high court is just the third time since 1971 that the justices have heard arguments based on this type of emergency application.<\/p>\n
Sankar noted following the argument that the court typically accepts challenges to government regulations after they take effect. If the Supreme Court blocks the EPA rule, he told reporters, it would \u201ceffectively be saying to industry, \u2018Look, any time you face costs from a regulation, c\u2019mon up and take a shot. We might block that rule for you.\u2019 And my question is whether this is a new rule that applies only to environmental regulations or whether it applies to all regulations.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kagan pushed back on the suggestion from the challengers\u2019 attorney that the EPA could have contemplated every possible permutation when it devised the rule.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of my clerks who does math better than I do tells me that there are two to the 23rd power, which is like 4 million different permutations. What was the EPA supposed to do?\u201d she asked.<\/p>\n
Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett seemed to share concerns expressed by her more liberal colleagues about whether lawyers for the challengers were being forthcoming about the costs of complying with the federal regulations.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe rule has been in effect for a while. Why haven\u2019t you talked about that?\u201d she asked Catherine Stetson, a lawyer for the industry groups. \u201cHave you incurred significant financial costs that are unreasonable?\u201d<\/p>\n
Stetson pointed to the costs of permitting to install new pollution controls and said later that industry anticipates \u201chundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars in costs over the next 12 to 18 months.\u201d<\/p>\n
Downwind states such as New York and Connecticut have argued that they cannot meet federal clean air standards without tighter controls on the smokestacks in neighboring states.<\/p>\n
Critics of the federal plan counter that the expense of adding new technology would put them out of business. They also say it could threaten the electrical grids in upwind states if power plant operators decide the compliance costs are too high to stay open.<\/p>\n
There was very little discussion at oral arguments on Wednesday of the health dangers to downwind state residents if the court blocked the regulation while the litigation continues.<\/p>\n
Some states would suffer worse consequences than others, said Judith Vale, New York\u2019s deputy solicitor general, noting that in Wisconsin, about 40 percent of the state\u2019s ozone pollution blows in from neighboring states, including 13 percent from Indiana alone. Vale said the EPA\u2019s regulation is not trying to get upwind states to innovate or install \u201cnewfangled things,\u201d but merely \u201cto get them to the middle of the pack\u201d among industry peers that are already using pollution controls.<\/p>\n
Yet in his questioning, Kavanaugh suggested the challenges facing polluting industries and downwind states were roughly equal. \u201cBoth sides have irreparable harm, so that\u2019s a wash,\u201d he said. \u201cBoth sides have a strong public interest in my view.\u201d<\/p>\n
The case is Ohio v. EPA.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The Environmental Protection Agency\u2019s effort to cut emissions from power plants and factories to reduce pollution that blows into neighboring states seems likely to be halted by the Supreme Court, a blow to an ambitious federal initiative that environmentalists have said is necessary to protect people, especially children and the elderly, from lung-damaging smog. During […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1310,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1309"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1309\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}